Though acknowledged as unpredictable in its consequences like every momentous turning point of the past, the fourth industrial revolution was hailed by participants at this national roundtable as entirely unique in terms of its pervasiveness, the profundity of the transformations induced, and the speed of the changes occasioned, marking something of a “progressive watershed” between one age and another. Yet precisely this – comprising, in reality, only a seeming contradiction – was held up as perfectly encapsulating the hybrid nature of the phenomenon: entailing on one hand a radical and obligatory paradigm shift, and on the other, transformations of an incremental ilk; and characterized in one regard by the absence of any single triggering event or any great scientific discovery that upturns all that has gone before, and in another by the inexorable accumulation of technological advances, breakthroughs, and enhancements. The task of pinning down the magnitude of this revolution is – it was suggested – made even more complex by the lack of any definite end-reach within which to delimit the impact of the same. Nobody, not even the boldest futurologists, yet knows how far advances in artificial intelligence, sophisticated use of algorithms, robotics, the Internet of Things, and limitless cloud-computing capacity may go.
The only acknowledged certainty was the need to adapt to the unpredictability of change and that such change pervades – and is increasingly set to pervade – every aspect of social life. From employment to welfare, from education to the management of economic and production processes, and from demographics to ethics and law: the transformations underway are changing power relations and social ties day by day, imposing largely unprecedented challenges on (national and supranational) institutions, social intermediaries, businesses, families, and individuals.
In particular, the participants pointed to the urgent need to manage these dynamics in the field of welfare and social protection models – an issue long at the center of public debate, in the United States as much as in Europe. Beyond the provocations of intriguing, albeit unfeasible, suggestions of replacing human beings with machines, what unites commentators of all persuasions is the perception that the new needs generated by the technological revolution call for an intelligent reformulation of both the nature of rights and of the rules in furtherance of them. Seen as also forming a backdrop to this was the so-called “dark decade” of the economic crisis, with the attendant polarization of wellbeing and opportunities, and the current state of health of traditional representative democracy, the codified conventions of which appear, for the most part, to be unsuited to supporting the new (impulsive and often haphazard) demands for participation, themselves also a product of technological progress.
It was remarked that the way in which these phenomena might be fashioned into a sustainable paradigm, in Italy and in Europe, remains a matter for debate. Firstly, on the “method” front, the question was posed as to whether it makes sense today to anchor, within a rigid model, processes that are by their very nature fluid, which is to say, in the habit of constantly changing. The participants felt that, without prejudice to the spectrum of inviolable rights and non-negotiable values, it is a matter of regulating the entire framework of relations between capital and labor flexibly, effectively declaring an end to a twentieth-century model that – by reason of being obsolete – is simply not up to meeting these challenges. Reform of active employment policies, compatibility and synergies between public and corporate welfare, Europeanization of social policies, and adaptability of social tools and services to demographic trends as well were cited as some of the many issues to be tackled and as first and foremost the purview of legislators, labor law experts, and jurisprudence scholars.
It was stressed, however, that if what is being transformed is the intrinsic nature of work, then it goes without saying that this change should implicate the very processes of education, training, and careers guidance upstream. In this area, the depth of the revolution is even more profound, as the change needs to encompass both cognitive learning pathways and the overall set of skills and knowledge required to gain entry to (or remain in or return to) so-called “transitional labor markets”. In simpler terms, in addition to ensuring an intelligent design for lifelong learning programs, a goal which can no longer be put off, there was also a perceived need for versatility in formulating a modern pedagogy that relevantly weds theory and practice, and especially that “lateral thinking” which has always been indispensable to humanity for managing change. By way of conclusion, it was emphasized that artificial intelligence is an extension of – and not a substitute for – human intellect, making it evidently incumbent on human ingenuity to find responses to the complexity of the present and the future with solutions based on creativity, resilience, and vision.